- Microsoft Teams is one of Microsoft's
very fastest growing products.
It's currently rolled out
to half a million businesses worldwide.
And so for the purposes of today's video
we are going to compare
the Microsoft Teams phone system offering
with the other common phone system that we use
which is the Gamma Horizon phone system
that lots of our customers use
which I think is a very stable, reliable
feature-rich platform.
So it's got quite a lot to live up to,
but is using Microsoft Teams as your phone system
actually gonna work and work well?
Today we're gonna find out.
Welcome to another TekkTalk Tuesday.
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So Microsoft don't have the best track record
when it comes to communication software.
I think in the last 10 years they've had four versions,
or four iterations, of their communications platforms.
So they started off with Office Communications Server.
That moved to Microsoft Lync.
That changed into Skype for Business
and now we are at Microsoft Teams.
I'm going to potentially upset a lot of my staff
because we're going to actually try and roll Teams out
as a phone system
and we're gonna try and get this used
throughout the whole company.
To do this properly I've also bought some headsets.
So we have, I bought 20 headsets 'cause I want to make sure
that everyone gets a chance to use this properly.
We went for the Jabra Evolve 20s I think they are, cool.
So anyway let's begin.
So to begin this journey you first need the obvious
which is a Microsoft Office 365 subscription.
Once you have this you then need to go and purchase add-ons
that make this thing actually sing and do its job.
So you need a phone system add-on
and you need a calling plan.
So let's go and do that.
Let's go into billing and purchase services.
Phone system, six pounds per user per month.
You are all set.
So now we just need
to go and assign these users to the subscription.
So we can go into find myself, go to the product licenses
and I'm assuming it shows up here as a add-on license.
- [Narrator] One eternity later.
- So it does show up on the list.
It just was taking some time.
So let's just activate that for myself.
So that's now the phone system added on.
Once you've got your features activated
you now need a calling plan
for every user that's gonna do this.
Domestic starts at nine pounds 10 per user per month
and the domestic and international
comes to eighteen pounds 10 per month.
Now we have the feature enabled.
We've got the calling plan.
We should be able to get some phone numbers.
So for that we need to go into
the Skype for Business admin center
because they haven't yet moved all of the features
and functionality over into the Microsoft Teams portal.
So we can go into voice.
Go to phone numbers in here.
Interested to find out if it's going to cost us money
to buy phone numbers because they seem to be quite keen
to charge for everything here.
So we're gonna go to United Kingdom.
We want de de de duh.
Fareham, one three two nine.
Interestingly not all of the cities and towns
and calling codes are on here.
So let's go for Southampton.
So we have 37 numbers.
We're gonna acquire those numbers.
The change has been saved successfully.
So it looks like we have to wait
for those numbers to be activated.
Not sure whether that's an automatic process,
whether we get an email
to ask us to activate them ourselves.
No emails waiting for activation.
I wonder if I just refresh this
whether that's gonna show me that it's working again?
Still pending, okay.
Address validation is important.
If for some reason the phone number isn't activated
and is listed as pending
you will need to create a service request.
Thrilling.
So we've tried to purchase some numbers for us,
but the number status is pending.
So we now how to, following Microsoft's guide,
open a case with Microsoft to get them
to manually activate the numbers
and apparently the call queue is 21 minutes to get an answer
so just waiting for somebody to call me back.
Come back to you in 21 minutes,
hopefully when they answer the phone.
- [Narrator] 20 minutes later.
- And they are currently just showing
as pending under number status
when I go into the voice users
on the Skype for Business admin center, okay.
'cause when I go onto the,
when I click on the help and about
it takes me to a number diversion that says
for organizations 150 or less we need to raise a case
and you guys can activate them on your side.
I think, if a phone number isn't activated
and listed as pending it's because of address validation.
- [Narrator] So much later that the old narrator
got tired of waiting and they had to hire a new one.
- It's now four hours later
and I've just got off the phone to Microsoft
who have fixed the number issue.
So the numbers are now activated in our accounts.
The fact it's taken four hours to get that to be done
is another issue that's worth addressing at some point.
And so now we can crack on and get the phones set up.
Get all the hunt groups set up. Get the call queues set up
and basically figure the whole thing and give it a try.
- [Narrator] A few moments later.
- I think we're ready to hand out some headsets.
So let's get that going.
So as you can likely see by the wardrobe change
it's the next day and one that unfortunately
ends the test deployment
of our Microsoft Teams phone system experiment
and it's been cut short for a few technical reasons.
Number one, there were some technical issues
with the number allocation and number activation
as we got to earlier in the video
that every time we were making changes to numbers
we were having to get them reactivated
which involved a support ticket with Microsoft
and it was you know four, five hours at a time
waiting for them to respond, getting them to phone back,
get them to fix it for us.
It's just not sustainable.
Number two, once we actually had the system up and running
before we went live with it
we realized there were some horrendous delays
in terms of the audio
and so you'd dial a phone number
and then wait five, sometimes even 10 seconds
before the other person's phone would ring
which was just, it was just gonna cause problems
and there were some workarounds and we looked online
and we opened a case again with Microsoft
and it was a known issue they were looking into.
Other people online had found a workaround
where you don't use call queues to do the call routing,
but it kind of defeats the purpose of the test really.
So I guess that brings me to the summary
of my thoughts thus far.
So firstly let's start with the goods.
I actually do quite like the software.
It's definitely user friendly.
It looks good.
Microsoft Teams is already
a bit of a powerhouse of a system anyway.
The call integration features are great.
The presence information is really, really good.
When you're in an email
and you can see that the person who has sent you an email
is available and you can give them a call
to discuss it any further.
That's really neat.
I do like that.
The configuration, when it's working properly,
is very, very simple.
It's really straightforward to set up.
Number allocation could be a bit better,
obviously given the issues we've had,
but also the fact that our Fareham dialing code
didn't appear anywhere on the available numbers.
So we can't actually buy a Fareham number
through Microsoft 365 which isn't that great.
You can get a Portsmouth number.
You can get a Southampton number.
So it seems like cities but not towns.
The call reports are actually quite handy
for when you're troubleshooting call quality issues.
You can see what device they were using,
the call quality rating, the connection they had.
That's really useful.
And of course you wouldn't expect anything less,
but the audio and the video conferencing
on Microsoft Teams is very, very good.
And if you're looking at something like Zoom
for your video conferencing that is very, very good.
So it's a very good comparison.
The bad stuff.
As you can tell this wasn't a successful deployment for us.
Whilst it's easy to set up,
the settings can be slow to apply,
particularly with the licenses.
When we're applying license changes
you're sometimes having to log out, hit refresh,
close the browser, open the browser, log back in again
and then sometimes having to wait half an hour or so.
Most of the time I actually made the changes, walked away,
did something else, came back
and then hopefully they would have updated and be working.
So that was quite frustrating
in terms of needing to make some changes
and get things done.
The platform is still missing some features
if we are comparing to something like Gamma Horizon.
Call recording which doesn't exist.
You can record webinars and conferences
and those kind of things but you can't just have a policy
to record all phone calls in and out of the platform.
Full reporting, whilst it's there
for things like call quality,
you don't get anywhere near the level of call reporting
that you can get with integrations
from the likes of Akixi with Gamma Horizon
where you can see all of the calls stats,
how many calls have been answered,
what's the average wait time, how many calls were missed
and how many calls are queued up.
You can do the whole wallboard, dashboard thing
where you can see all of the call awaiting stats
and that information
that you can get from Gamma is incredible.
And it's the weakest point, is the support.
You know, we've had quite a few issues with the setup
and each time you have to raise a support case.
When you need to make small changes
like activating new numbers
and you're having to then raise a support case
every single time.
It's just not viable.
I looked back through support cases
over the last 30 days.
There is an outage from just nine days ago
where it was reported at 25% of inbound calls were failing
and this took them through from the 27th of June
through to the 2nd of July to resolve.
So that in itself isn't a good start.
Even today there's a Tweet from Microsoft
to say there are more issues with Microsoft Teams,
sign in issues, calling issues.
So the reliability just isn't there just yet.
And then the issues we had of course
with the calls taking a while to ring the other end
and which was again another known issue.
There were some workarounds
that we, to be honest we just didn't have time to try
and we couldn't be bothered
when the platform should just work as it is.
We don't have any of these kind of issues
with any other system we've used
so we shouldn't really expect it from,
particularly not Microsoft Teams.
Microsoft is a huge player in the market.
So that's really the biggest bugbear we've got
and I personally would not recommend Microsoft Teams
as a phone system just yet.
Lastly, just the cost. If we add up the features,
the phone system is six pounds per month.
You've gotta add on the calling plan
which starts at nine pounds 10 per user per month.
That already takes you to 15 pounds 10 per user per month
which means the Microsoft Teams phone system
costs more than the other systems that we offer.
Gamma Horizon, we offer that at
12 pounds 50 per user per month.
You get free handsets within that cost
whereas with Microsoft Teams
you have to either buy a handset
or you have to buy a headset.
So that's another additional cost
that you have to factor in
when you're looking at Microsoft Teams.
And yeah, so that's really my summary.
I think it's a very, very good system.
I think it can be a very good system.
It just needs some more tweaking from Microsoft.
So that's it from me today. I'll leave it there.
Like the video if you did.
Subscribe if you're not ready
and I'll see you in the next one. Thank you.
Bye bye.